On Willa Cather’s birthday

Willa Cather was born on this day in 1873.

From a letter to Cather’s lifelong friend Carrie Miner Sherwood, written on a Sunday, possibly December 11, 1932. The editors of the Selected Letters note that “many of Cather’s old friends in Webster County, Nebraska, were, like most Americans, facing economic hardship.”

Now will you be my Santa Claus? I want them to have a good Christmas dinner. I know they won’t buy prunes or dried apricots, they felt too poor to get them last year.

Please have Mrs. Burden pack a box:

2 dozen of the best oranges,
3 pounds of dates,
5 pounds best prunes
3 cans Texas figs
3 pounds cranberries
3 bunches celery
1 peck red apples

If there is any money left over after you get these things, get some Butternut coffee — I know they will cut the old lady down on her coffee, so put whatever is left into coffee.

I’ve already sent Mrs. Lambrecht a Christmas box, a lovely sweater and a lot of toys, but that was before I got Lydia’s letter.

I’m sitting in the middle of a pile of trunks, dear Carrie. We move today. I think the new apartment will be lovely, but I’d have waited another year if I’d known so many of my old friends were going to be hard hit. I do want to help.

                                                Lovingly
                                                 Willie

From The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

I know of at least one other resident of the blog-o-sphere marking Cather’s birthday today, Heber Taylor.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard) : All OCA posts from Cather’s letters

[The inconsistent punctuation in the list is Cather’s. I would never mess up when transcribing Willa Cather.]

The Christmas sardine

From Zingerman’s Delicatessen, “The Legend of the Christmas Sardine,” by Brad Hedeman:

[Click for a much larger view.]

You can find the story on page 10 of the November–December installment of Zingerman’s News.

Thanks to Kevin Hart for sending the story in my direction.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[From Medium: “Brad Hedeman is the Head of Marketing & Products Selection at Zingerman’s Mail Order.”]

Speech and conduct

The New York Times reports on calls for the resignation of University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill (gift link):

Alumni, students and donors of the University of Pennsylvania called on Wednesday for Elizabeth Magill to resign as president of the school, a day after she testified at a contentious congressional hearing about campus antisemitism and evaded questions about whether students calling for the genocide of Jews violated Penn’s code of conduct.

It was Elise Stefanik who asked Magill to answer yes or no: does calling for the genocide of Jews violate the university’s rules or code of conduct? Magill’s answer: “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.” She then allowed that calling for genocide “can be harassment.” Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president, drew the same distinction between speech and conduct, referring to speech that “crosses into conduct that violates our policies.”

It’s difficult to imagine a call for genocide against some other group eliciting such nuanced responses. But whatever: it’s specious to draw a line that divides speech from conduct. As speech-act theory reminds us, there are many contexts in which to speak is to act. (Think of a former president’s pre-January 6 tweets.) And conduct need not constitute harassment to be out of bounds on a college campus.

[I find Elise Stefanik’s politics abhorrent. But the answer to the question should be yes, no matter who’s asking.]

Florida fail, Illinois fail

I had a surprise in the mail last week: what appeared to be an invoice from the Florida Department of Transportation for unpaid tolls. Years ago I received an e-mail with a fake speeding ticket. And I’ve been called by “the IRS.” Was this invoice, too, a scam? No, I looked online and found that the address and toll-free number on the invoice were legitimate.

The invoice included a photograph — a black rectangle with a tiny image of a license plate, 5/16″ × 2/16″. I looked with a loupe and saw the numbers of my license plate. Yikes. But next to the numbers were the letters FP, signifying fleet plate, the kind of plate issued to rental car companies.

The toll-free number offered no possibility of speaking to another human. So I went online again and found a form for disputing the charges. I explained the difference between my plates and the plate in the photograph. I attached photographs of my plates, front and rear. A little overkill never hurts. I added that I have never been to Florida.

Today I received an e-mail saying that “the case” is closed: “It was a plate misread.” But before getting that e-mail, I called the Illinois Secretary of State’s office to inquire if the state indeed issues regular plates and fleet plates with the same numbers. I spoke with someone in the Record Inquiry Section who told me to download, fill out, and mail in a form requesting a document (free) that I could then send to Florida to prove that the plate in the invoice photograph wasn’t mine. “But I’ve already sent them photos of my license plates,” said I. No matter, the guy said. They might not be accepted.

When I asked if Illinois indeed issues regular plates and fleet plates with the same numbers, I was told that it happens all the time. “Then at least I know I’m not alone,” I said, and I thanked him for his help. “Sir,” the guy said, followed by silence, and I ended the call. Was he expecting me to call him “sir”? What the actual.

I went back to the Secretary of State website and filled out another form to suggest a brilliant solution to these problems: don’t issue regular plates and FP plates with the same numbers. Imagine the hours of pointless effort that might be saved by not doing so.

Meanwhile, someone’s driving around who owes Florida $4.88 in tolls.

Nuts to dictation

When Elaine introduced me to the iOS app Flow Free, she had no idea that she was creating a monster.

But my point concerns dictation. I texted our daughter about the app, and added that I had “the not free version.” Dictation made it “the nut free version,” without even dropping in a hyphen.

Nuts to dictation.

Related reading
More fun dictation failures (Pinboard)

[If I hadn’t been dictating, I would’ve just typed paid.]

Chock!

The narrator’s chocolate factory is going under.

Vladimir Nabokov, Despair (1966).

Can you guess?

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

[The answer is chocolate: chock — O! — late. And the three together — chocolate — are his ruin. This post has no relation to Chock full o’Nuts, though it’s wonderful to enjoy a piece of chocolate and a cup of that heavenly coffee.]

Investing in reading

“A new study found that California schools got positive results from a targeted investment in the science of reading — even with the challenges of pandemic recovery”: “What Costs $1,000 Per Student and Might Help Children Learn to Read?” (The New York Times, gift link).

But — sigh — my daughter Rachel points out that the photograph accompanying the article shows the “whole language” approach to reading instruction in practice — the opposite of what “the science of reading” is all about.

The best place to begin learning about the work of teaching children to read: the podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.

Related reading
All OCA literacy posts (Pinboard)

[Yes, I e-mailed the Times.]

Squirrel condo

As drawn by Geo-B: a squirrel condo.

See also the Towne Branch subdivision.

[The no. I item in squirrel HOA bylaws: Residents must look cute.]

Fish and Florida

The New York Times reports that academics — at least those who are able — are fleeing Florida (gift link).

But guess who’s signed up to teach at Florida’s New College: Stanley Fish. Len Gutkin of the The Chronicle of Higher Education asked him about it. A sample:

Given how controversial New College is, why do you want to teach there now?

Well, the simple nitty gritty reason is that I’m 85 years old, and someone who asks me to teach courses is a godsend. So I responded affirmatively.

Do you worry at all that, given that something like a third of faculty members have left New College following the new administration, you’ll be taken to be making a statement about New College or about DeSantis?

Taken by whom?

Observers in academe who might feel that your prominence as a scholar and an administrator is being used to ratify the political project that New College has become.

Yeah, I can see that as a possible way of viewing this appointment. But such matters go under the general category of consequences that I can neither predict nor control. What I can control is the kind of teaching I do, and of course I wouldn’t want to get engaged in a classroom experience if I felt that that classroom was being monitored for political or ideological reasons. But I’ve had no hint of any such monitoring in my discussions.

Russell Jacoby’s 2013 take on Stanley Fish still holds: “He has always bravely defended self-interest. With friends like him, the humanities needs no enemies.”

The Chronicle interview contains many remarkable statements. Just one: Fish, who cheerfully admits that he long ago forgot whatever Greek he learned, claims that at Ralston University, the start-up “traditional” college he’s associated with, students with just six months of Greek were reading — and discussing — the Iliad in Greek. Gutkin, who studied Greek as an undergrad, says that seems “almost impossible.”

No, no, says Fish. The discussion, he claims, “was very precise about details of the verse and how it worked, and how various words interacted with one another or were opposed to one another.” But wait a minute, wait a minute:

How did you know, if it was in Greek?

Oh, I could tell that much. There’s a certain kind of gesturing with respect to texts that is known to any of us who have worked with texts for a while.

I am now thinking about a certain kind of gesturing.

Two more Fish posts
Fish on Strunk and White : Review of Fish’s How to Write a Sentence

[Fish was previously the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University.]

Harvard, Meta, and veritas

From The Washington Post (gift link):

A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech.

Joan Donovan claimed in a filing with the Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general that her superiors soured on her as Harvard was getting a record $500 million pledge from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm.

The detail that really got me:

Donovan says in her complaint that [Harvard Kennedy School dean Doug] Elmendorf emailed her after the October donors’ meeting and asked to discuss her Facebook work and “focus on a few key issues drawn from the questions raised by the Dean’s Council and my own limited reading of current events.”

He wrote that he wanted to hear from her about “How you define the problem of misinformation for both analysis and possible responses (algorithm-adjusting or policymaking) when there is no independent arbiter of truth (in this country or others) and constitutional protections of speech (in some countries)?”

Donovan said in the filing that Elmendorf’s use of the phrase “arbiters of truth” alarmed her because Facebook uses the same words to explain its reluctance to take actions against false content.

That there is “no independent arbiter of truth” doesn’t mean that there are no arbiters, no facts. I like what Robert Caro says about facts and truth.

Harvard’s motto, of course, is veritas. It’s everywhere on the campus.

*

June 11, 2024: At The Chronicle of Higher Education, Stephanie M. Lee revisits this story: “Is This Famous Misinformation Expert Spreading Misinformation?” An excerpt:

Here was a narrative with the kernels of some undeniable truths. Meta does funnel money into higher ed; Harvard is cozy with the 1 percent. But a believable story is not necessarily a true one. Donovan presented no firsthand evidence that Meta was behind her ouster. And when I tried to get to the bottom of what actually happened at Harvard, a different narrative emerged from interviews, documents, recordings, texts, and emails.